The staff of specially trained veterinarians at
Confuse
a Cat, Ltd." can handle
any job, from newborn kittens to snow leopards.
The staff of specially trained veterinarians at
Confuse
a Cat, Ltd." can handle
any job, from newborn kittens to snow leopards.
Stating the obvious, to people who don't want to hear it:
Bill Gates reminds the CEO of Business Week that
people living on a dollar a day
aren't
a market for software and PCs:
"Do people have a clear idea of what it means to make $1 a day?" Gates said. "There is no electricity. No power systems. These people are trying to stay alive. There is no need for a PC."Shuster then accused Gates of not "getting" the Internet because he put health ahead of PCs. [via Rebecca's Pocket]
Men
die, horses die, even the gods themselves will someday die
Only word-fame lasts forever.
Word-fame, and bacteria:
Bacterial spores found in 250-million-year-old salt crystals
have
been successfully revived under scrupulously sterile conditions.
A couple
of local links: if you're renting an apartment in New York,
or even thinking about it, you can find the relevant
regulations at the
Division of Housing and
Community Renewal.
If you ride the New York subways regularly, especially at night or on the weekends, the Straphanger Campaign has a variety of useful information, and an email service that will notify you of schedule changes on one or more subway lines. (Unfortunately, you need to enable JavaScript to sign up, but the email is normal text.)
On the Internet, nobody knows that
your
sysadmin is a cat.
Good
prosthetic
legs--ones that, like a real leg, can adjust to the
terrain a person is walking on--are "expected to be on the
market in two years." The work, involving both better materials
and microchips, is a collaboration between Sandia National Labs,
the Russian nuclear weapons laboratory Chelyabinsk 70, and
a group of orthopedists.
Not only is the Cold War over, we may have actual peace, not
merely an exhausted cold ceasefire.
Is anyone listening? Does anyone care about the truth?
Phil Agre
analyzes
the Republican character assassination technique, as used against
Al Gore.
The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character.
The GOP calls it "PR 101," because admitting that their basic strategy is the Big Lie would be too blatant, at least until after November 7.
Vote for Nader, vote for Gore, vote for Browne or Buchanan if you must, or write in your mother's name. But read this if you're even thinking of voting for Bush, or if you believe anything his people have said about Gore and the Internet, or Love Canal, or Love Story.
More things in Heaven and Earth, and under them: a
tiny
animal found in a well in Greenland is not only a new species,
but a new phylum. Limnognathia maerski is parthenogenetic
and noteworthy for its extremely complex jaws.
Copenhagen University's breeding colony lives in a refrigerator.
Would you pay to celebrate the writing of the man who,
shortly after the Battle of Wounded Knee,
wrote
"The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians," he wrote. "Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."
A lot of people might, since the author went on to write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but that and similar editorials have become one of the issues in an argument over whether to build an Oz theme park. [via Follow Me Here]
The beauty of the
great
bellybutton lint survey is that they invite participants
to send samples for analysis.
/usr/bin/girl
claims that we've probably all seen this, but
I hadn't: a cheerful picture of Office Assistant trying to
help
write a suicide note.
A field team from the
Museum of the Rockies
has discovered
five
Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons at one site in one summer's
digging. This suggests that T. rex was more common
than previously believed: until this year, only 20 T. rex
skeletons had been found anywhere, and large fierce animals
are usually rare.
Molly Ivins
accepts
George W. Bush's invitation to look at his record on
appointing Texas judges. It's not pretty.
This year's
Ig Nobel
Awards have been announced. My favorite is the physics award,
which was given to Andre Geim and Michael Berry for
levitating frogs,
but the only award-winner you'll see in many homes is
PawSense.
It's a beautiful morning in Belgrade, and this is what
liberation
looks like.
Russia's closest friends, having tried everything else to save
it from itself, are
considering
an intervention. It's the usual tough-love thing: we aren't
going to let you destroy yourself, because your problems are
hurting us:
If we show Russia that we're doing this because we care, and we can avoid getting bogged down in a winter land campaign, I think we've got a really good shot at winning the country over.
Chronic exposure to low-level radiation causes
wheat
to mutate at three times the predicted rate, or six times
the rate of otherwise identical plants growing in uncontaminated
fields. In other words, the previous models for this sort of
radiation were way off. The
important open questions are what effect, if any, these mutations
have on the health of the plant, and whether this level of
radiation has the same effect on animals.
It's a small world: AltaVista promises a
map
"for any address in the world," but the form requires you to specify
which U.S. state the address is in.
[via New Scientist's excellent
Feedback
page]
Copyright 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.
